Standout NHRA crew chief Aaron Brooks is back in the mix and keeping busy at NHRA national events.

This weekend at the NHRA Toyota Nationals (Oct. 25-28) at Las Vegas he will be tuning again for nitro Funny Car driver Jeff Diehl.

“I helped Jeff in Dallas (Oct. 5-7) and I went and hung out with Dom Lagana’s Top Fuel team in Reading (Pa.) and Charlotte (N.C.),” Brooks said. “I will be in Vegas with Jeff and I might be with Jeff in Pomona (Calif., Nov. 8-11). This is what I want to be out there doing.”

Brooks spent the 2017 season as the crew chief for nitro Funny Car world championship driver Cruz Pedregon and was released by Pedregon’s team the first week of August this season.

“I’ve known Jeff from seeing him at the track and it was a challenge to come into some place new,” Brooks said. “You don’t know what to expect. You have all different parts and all different people. He has some decent stuff. We just need to work on a lot of little fundamental mechanical stuff and get it straightened out and make sure everything works right. In Dallas, we put a new fuel system and new fuel pump and a couple of little things didn’t work right on that and we lost a couple of runs. Then, in the first round, we broke a clutch lever, which caused us to smoke the tires.”

Diehl qualified No. 14 in Dallas and then lost in first round to Tim Wilkerson. Despite the early exit, Brooks knows he and Diehl can build off that race.

“I took all his clutches back with me and went through his two clutches,” Brooks said. “We have two clutches freshened up and we sorted out some little things that needed to be tuned up. I think we got the fuel system thing fixed in Dallas and we will see how things work out this weekend. In Vegas, I want him to try and go down the track. When we first started talking before Dallas, they (Diehl’s team) struggled. I think Seattle was their last race and I think they only made one full pull in a while. It was smoking the tires and having a lot of little mechanical stuff in the runs where he had gone down the track. The main goal is to get the thing to go down the track a few times in a row.”

Prior to joining Pedregon in 2017, Brooks served as a crew chief at Morgan Lucas Racing from 2013-16 but was left looking for work when MLR was disbanded.

While at Morgan Lucas Racing, Brooks was the crew chief for Top Fuel driver Richie Crampton. He guided Crampton to seven national event wins and five No. 1 qualifying positions.

Brooks began his career working on crews for the legendary Don “The Snake” Prudhomme. By 2005, Brooks served as an assistant crew chief to Mike Neff when Funny Car driver Gary Scelzi won a world championship driving for Don Schumacher Racing. During his time at DSR, Brooks also tuned Frank Hawley’s Funny Car. Actually, in one season, he tuned Funny Car’s driven by Hawley, Mike Ashley, and Mark Oswald.

Brooks continued to wrench Funny Cars as he was a tuner for Del Worsham’s Funny Car at Al-Anabi Racing in 2009 and 2010. Brooks also tuned Melanie Troxel’s Funny Car at R2B2 Racing in 2011.